Coming Up for Air by George Orwell

Here is another book I abandoned in my twenties.  I came back to it because I thought I was 'ready' for it.  I am glad that I did, mainly because I have not duplicated the mistakes of the protagonist of the story.

George Bowling is an overweight man.  At the age of forty-five, he discovers he is married with two children.  He is in a safe and respectable job that he performs well.  Life is comfortable but unchallenging for George, and he becomes disquieted by it all.

A little piece of luck comes George's way; but instead of sharing it with his family, he decides to use it for his own selfish purposes.  He tells his wife he is going to Birmingham on business for a few days.  In reality, George goes back to his childhood village to do a spot of fishing and to take a walk down memory lane.  What he finds unsettles him even more.

Coming Up for Air is a book about the anxiety of a mid-life crisis and the folly of seeking a cure in the past. It is a pessimistic book.  Through George Bowling, we feel the oppression of the prospect an imminent war, we witness both the harmless and the hateful lunacies to which human fall prey in their lives: lives that are portrayed as long, barren and pointless.  George Bowling thinks his present-day life is in the 'bottom of a dustbin', and he yearns to surface, to come up to the fresh air, by going home to Lower Binfield, where life had been simpler and sweeter.  In the end, he finds himself deeper in the dustbin with the realisation that the past is neither a cure nor an anodyne for the pain of the present. 

Far more rewarding than George Bowling's story of self-pity, frustration and nihilism - he could have found his cure in any book on Buddhism and Mindfulness - is the way the story is told.  Orwell has George tell his tale in the first-person.  For all his pessimism and jaundiced outlook on life, George Bowling is a great storyteller.  His evocation of his childhood, with all its excursions down the lanes and side-streets of family history, schooling and young love, is quite exquisite.  George lays it out in a pretty pattern for the reader, and in such sharp-relief with the dissatisfaction of his present life that we truly feel his existential pain.  

We can never go back, no matter much how we try.  The world changes, and not always for the better.  That's life.  The theme is universal.  You have been warned!

Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons

This one has been on my reading list for a long time.  In fact, I have started it three times before now, only to have life intervene and make me put it down.  Fourth time's a charm.

Cold Comfort Farm is a parody on the English rural novels that were popular in the opening decades of the 20th century.  Like them, it is full of doom-laden characters who are tortured by their own glaring psychological problems.  However, into their midst comes Flora Poste, a modern girl with modern ideas, a penchant for organising others and a never-say-die attitude.  

Cold Comfort Farm itself is situated on the outskirts of the fictional town of Howling in Surrey.  It is populated by several generations of the Starkadder family.  Amos and Judith are the parents of Reuben, Seth and Elfine.  Amos spends his weekends delivering hell-fire sermons in Howling; Reuben wants to run the farm according to modern techniques but can't while his father is still around;  handsome and virile Seth is a notorious womaniser with a secret passion;  Elfine is an unrefined girl who needs an education; Judith has an unhealthy self-esteem problem and an even unhealthier obsession about her son Seth.  

And ruling the roost is Judith's mother Ada Doom, who 'saw something nasty in the woodshed' when she was a child.  Ada Doom uses this experience as a psychological weapon to stifle her family and to cause life at Cold Comfort Farm to stagnate for over twenty years.  The question is: Can Flora's youthful momentum overcome the decades of Ada Doom-induced inertia? Of course, the joy of reading Cold Comfort Farm is in finding out the answer to that question. 

Stella Gibbons tells her story with a disarmingly breezy prose style that gently pushes the reader from one scene to the next.  And like a breeze she blows into every psychological nook and cranny of her characters.  Gibbons builds the tension throughout the first two-thirds of the book, and this leads to the brilliant and totally satisfying relief of the denouement in the last third of the book.  Gibbons controls the plot and characterisation with such a deft touch that the parody never blows out into farce.  The result is that Cold Comfort Farm is a masterpiece of comic storytelling in the form of a novel.

I'm so glad I was given the opportunity of finally finishing this book.  I really enjoyed it.

Cold Comfort Farm was first published in 1932.